When her mother dies in a riot between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists, she is sent to live with her deceased father's relatives in Grizehayes, a fictional fortress in the north of England.

Makepeace has the inherited trait that allows her to store the spirits of recently deceased people or animals inside herself, like the rest of her father's family.

Discovering that her relatives keep her alive purely as a spare vessel for the spirits, she flees to Oxford and becomes entangled in the conflict of the war herself.

"[2] Strange Horizons writes "...to the question, “does Hardinge manage the notorious and eventful historical context in a way that avoids outrageous distortion while still primarily serving the needs of her plot?”—yes.

The Lie Tree, 2015) continue to depict her main female and male characters as prickly, intelligent, and realistically fallible; their friendship valuable for its ability to deepen through repair, rather than its shot-proof and foreordained perfection?”—indeed.